Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Stars in a Time Warp 22: White Ground Chintzes

We're going back in time to the earliest American patchwork, so we will be spending the summer months discussing fabrics found in quilts before the 1840s.

Antique star block, collection of Old Sturbridge Village

Early 19th century

The most distinctive of the early prints are chintzes, a style defined in 1663 by English diarist Samuel Pepys. He recorded a shopping trip to buy his wife "a chintz, that is, a painted Indian calico, for to line her study."

To Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman traveling in America in 1828, chintz meant "the material of a curtain" and the definition remains the same. Chintz generally means a cotton furnishing fabric, used for drapes, slipcovers and upholstery.

White-ground chintz with border print from a garment, 18th century

The figures in the earliest prints are block-printed and hand-painted. This

is the type of Indian chintz that became fashionable with Europeans

when cotton became a pillar of world trade.

We'll begin with white-ground chintzes, which were used for furnishing fabrics but also quite popular for clothing in the 18th- and early-19th-centuries.

Madame Pompadour by François-Hubert Drouai,

1763-4

The mistress of the King of France

wears an elaborate cotton dress to do her needlework.

Detail of Madame's dress.

Drouai could paint!

Early chintz imports were wood-block printed to Indian taste with light figures on dark-colored backgrounds, a remarkable novelty to Europeans. Novelty soon wore off, however, and sales dropped. By the mid-1600s English middlemen began influencing Indian design by sending sample patterns and requesting changes in traditional figures and coloring. Letters in trading company records advised artists to substitute white backgrounds for "sad red grounds"

Gown from Colonial Williamsburg collection, 1780

Cotton print worn over quilted silk petticoat

The popularity of imported cotton prints alarmed established producers of silk and wools who demanded trade protection. In 1700 Parliament prohibited the English from importing and wearing foreign prints. French chintz lovers fared no better with bans on French and foreign chintzes in effect from 1686 to 1759, laws flouted by the fashionable.

The Netherlands was one of the few European countries permitting free trade in chintzes.

Man's garments in large-scale chintzes

Collection: Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands

The Dutch wore amazing garments that were illegal in other countries.

Woman's jacket

Collection of the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands

Antique star quilt alternating with a nine-patch.

Years ago Ladies Circle Patchwork Quilts

published this fabulous quilt with the caption

that it was from Edisto Island, South Carolina.

Detail of Hephzibah Jenkins Townsend's small quilt.

Collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Hephzibah made this quilt on Edisto Island too. White ground chintz seems to have been a favorite with Carolina quilters.

a lot of accurate chintz repros in these heavier furnishing materials.

If the green seems too bright, cut around it.

What to do with your Stack of Stars?

Make a chintz medallion.

Maryland, Math and A Magnifying Glass by Sylvia Jennings Galbraith

Sylvia interpreted an early Maryland quilt for an AQSG Quilt Study of

quilts made before 1840.

Lori Smith's pattern Reminiscence

Mariann Simmons for the Virginia Quilt Museum

Di Ford, Phebe reproduction

Bobbi Finley and Carol Gilham Jones

One More Thing About Chintz

Glazed neat stripe in an early-19th-century British hexagon

We may think of chintz as a glazed fabric because we can buy plain chintz, a shiny cotton with no print at all. Traditionally chintz was finished with a glaze or not. In the past the surfaces were polished with wax, resin or starch, treatment that added weight, stiffness and elegance. The shine also repelled stains and dirt, but was liable to wash away.

Glazed chintz stripe for furnishings, end of the 20th century

Mills use other chemicals to obtain a shiny surface today.

Don't focus on the glaze. Chintz is best defined as a large-scale furnishing print.

These are my favorite fabrics, so nice to see so many here in so many different uses. Lately Arrived From London is my favorite fabric line ever. Remember that blue on white chintz design that was a maybe for that line but didn't make it. You PROMISED that we would be getting some of that later:-) Remember? Just a friendly reminder.